Today dawned bright and sunny again; hopefully we’ll see no more rain until we’re back in Blighty. 🙂
In the shopping arcade on the ship there was a shop selling merchandise with the Cunard and Queen Elizabeth logos on them. A lot of the QE stuff had “Maiden Season 2010-11” etched onto it. Today though, they were selling some very-limited-edition “Maiden Voyage” merchandise, and it was announced that the shop would open at 9.00am and each passenger was limited to buying two items each; this was to prevent people buying truck-loads of the stuff (it has been known!) to sell on E-Bay at a profit.
We went down to the shops at 09:10am and joined the extremely long queue. Ten minutes later someone came out of the shop and said that ALL the Maiden Voyage stuff had sold out; every last bit of it. It will be interesting to see how much of it ends up on E-Bay. 🙂 What is the point of buying a souvenir of the Maiden Voyage on E-Bay if you haven’t even been on the ship? Surely the point of special-edition souvenirs is to give a memento to the people who were actually there.
At 10.00am we went along to the Royal Court Theatre to listen to a presentation about Clint Eastwood, by the film historian Barry Brown. The 45-minute talk included clips from Eastwood’s illustrious film career and was very interesting. I’m not really a fan of Westerns but I did enjoy the “Man with No Name” trilogy; they are just classics.
Later on we were having a stroll around the promenade deck when the First Officer did the noon announcement with the navigational information. He also mentioned the appalling weather we had had in Madeira, and confirmed the story of the little dog that had got washed into the sea with the flood waters. Sure enough, a member of QE’s crew had gone out in the pilot boat and rescued the dog, which was a bitch. The dog had no collar or tags and appeared to be a stray, so the crew member adopted her as a pet for his children. There was only one name he could give to her – Queen Elizabeth. What a lovely little story! 🙂
As we were wandering around the ship, we saw a guy going round taking photos of absolutely everything; even the patterns on the carpets! I thought he looked vaguely familiar, and he looked at me and did a double-take as well. It was another blast from the past, this time none other than Alan Lang from Melbourne; he and his wife Marion had shared our table on the Queen Victoria, three years ago! It really is a small world. 🙂 We went back along to Alan’s cabin as he wanted me to write down our email address so he could send some photos from the QV, and we had a nice long chat with him and Marion. Lucky people are doing the next two cruises on the QE as well. It’s all right for some!
We got ready fairly early on as we were due to attend the Cunard World Club party at 5.15pm, just before dinner. We are currently Gold members; in fact this voyage qualifies us for Platinum grade. As ever, we went along to the Queen’s Room and positioned ourselves in the best place to make the most of the free champers! 🙂 We did quite well; I think we managed five glasses each.
I didn’t want to go and eat a massive dinner, so once again I just went to the restaurant for the coffee and liqueur course. The show tonight was the ship’s singers and dancers doing a production called “Sing”. I must say that the ship’s orchestra is very good, and we enjoyed the show a lot.
Then it was off to the Golden Lion to do some singing of our own, as Simon John on the piano was doing a good old pub singalong. There wasn’t all that many people in the Golden Lion, so the singing was a bit flat, but never mind, we had fun anyway. 🙂